Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Event-related brain potentials when conjugating Russian verbs: The modularity of language procedures

  • Published:
Human Physiology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Within the alternative concepts of “two-system” and “single-system” language models, brain mechanisms for the generation of regular and irregular forms of Russian verbs have been studied. The evoked EEG activity was recorded in 19 channels with random alternation of different speech-morphology operations. The infinitives of imperfective verbs that belong either to the productive group (conventionally, the default, or regular, class) or to the unproductive group (conventionally, the irregular class) were presented to healthy subjects. The subjects were to produce the first-person present-time forms of these verbs. The results of the analysis of the event-related potentials (ERPs) of 22 subjects are presented. Statistically valid ERP amplitude distinctions between the verb groups are found only in latencies of 600–850 ms in the central and parietal zones of the cortex. The peak values of the irregular-verb potentials are negative in this region in relation to the peak values of the regular-verb potentials. The findings are interpreted as the effect of various complexities of mental work with verbs of different groups and do not support the hypothesis of the universality of the two-system brain mechanism for processing regular and irregular language phenomena.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Pinker, S., Rules of language, Science, 1991, vol. 253, no. 5019, p. 530.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Pinker, S., Words and rules: the ingredients of language, New York: Harper Collins, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Marcus, G.F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., et al., Over regularization in language acquisition, Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev., 1992, vol. 57, no. 4, p. 2281.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Prasada, S. and Pinker, S., Generalization of regular and irregular morphological patterns, Lang. Cogn. Proc., 1993, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 1.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Ullman, M.T., Corkin, S., Coppola, M., et al., A neural dissociation within language: evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system, J. Cogn. Neurosci., 1997, vol. 9, no. 2, p. 266.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Rumelhart, D., McClelland, J., On learning the past tenses of English verbs. Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition, in Psychological and Biological Models, Rumelhart, D. and McClelland, J., Eds., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986, vol. 2, p. 216.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Plunkett, K. and Marchman, V., From rote learning to system building: acquiring verb morphology in children and connectionist nets, Cognition, 1993, vol. 48, no. 1, p. 21.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  8. Bybee, J., Regular morphology and the lexicon, Language and Cognitive Processes, 1995, vol. 10, no. 5, p. 425.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Beretta, A., Campbell, C., Carr, T.H., et al., An ERfMRI investigation of morphological inflection in German reveals that the brain makes a distinction between regular and irregular forms, Brain Lang., 2003, vol. 85, no. 1, p. 67.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. de Diego, Balaguer, R., Rodríguez-Fornells, A., Rotte, M., et al., Neural circuits subserving the retrieval of stems and grammatical features in regular and irregular verbs, Hum. Brain Mapp., 2006, vol. 27, no. 11, p. 874.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Desai, R., Conant, L.L., Waldron, E., and Binder, J.R., FMRI of past tense processing: the effects of phonological complexity and task difficulty, J. Cogn. Neurosci., 2006, vol. 18, no. 2, p. 278.

    Article  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  12. Indefrey, P., Kleinschmidt, A., Merboldt, K.D., et al., Equivalent responses to lexical and nonlexical visual stimuli in occipital cortex: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, Neuroimage, 1997, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 78.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  13. Joanisse, M.F. and Seidenberg, M.S., Imaging the past: neural activation in frontal and temporal regions during regular and irregular past-tense processing, Cogn. Affect. Behav. Neurosci., 2005, vol. 5, no. 3, p. 282.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  14. Oh, T.M., Tan, K.L., Ng, P., et al., The past tense debate: is phonological complexity the key to the puzzle?, Neuroimage, 2011, vol. 57, no. 1, p. 271.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  15. Sach, M., Seitz, R.J., and Indefrey, P., Unified inflectional processing of regular and irregular verbs: a pet study, Neuroreport, 2004, vol. 15, no. 3, p. 533.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  16. Sahin, N.T., Pinker, S., and Halgren, E., Abstract grammatical processing of nouns and verbs in broca’s area: evidence from fmri, Cortex, 2006, vol. 42, no. 4, p. 540.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  17. Lavric, A., Pizzagalli, D., Forstmeier, S., and Rippon, G., A double-dissociation of English past-tense production revealed by event-related potentials and low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (LORETA), Clin. Neurophysiol., 2001, vol. 112, no. 10, p. 1833.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  18. Marslen-Wilson, W. and Tyler, L.K., Rules, representations, and the English past tense, Trends Cogn. Sci., 1998, vol. 2, no. 11, p. 428.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  19. Münte, T.F., Say, T., Clahsen, H., et al., Decomposition of morphologically complex words in English: evidence from event-related brain potentials, Cogn. Brain Res., 1999, vol. 7, no. 3, p. 241.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Newman, A.J., Ullman, M.T., Pancheva, R., et al., An ERP study of regular and irregular English past tense inflection, Neuroimage, 2007, vol. 34, no. 1, p. 435.

    Article  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  21. Dhond, R.P., Marinkovic, K., Dale, A.M., et al., Spatiotemporal maps of past-tense verb inflection, Neuroimage, 2003, vol. 19, no. 1, p. 91.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  22. Russkaya grammatika (Russian Grammar), vol. 1: Fonetika, fonologiya, udarenie, intonatsiya, slovoobrazovanie, morfologiya (Phonetics, Phonology, Stress, Intonation, Word Formation, Morphology), Moscow: Nauka, 1980, p. 792.

  23. Chernigovskaya T. and Gor, K., The complexity of paradigm and input frequencies in native and second language verbal processing: evidence from Russian, In Language and language behavior, Wande, E. and Chernigovskaya, T., Eds., 2000, p. 20.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Chernigovskaya, T.V., Experimental study of the lexicon and morphological procedures in Russian-speaking adults and children: rules or analogies?, Vestn. RGNF, 2002, no. 4, p. 123.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Gor, K. and Chernigovskaya, T., Mental lexicon structure in L1 and L2 acquisition: Russian evidence, Glossos, 2003, no. 4. www.seelrc.org/glossos/issues/4/.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Lyashevskaya, O.N. and Sharov, S.A., Chastotnyi slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo yazyka (na materialakh Natsional’nogo korpusa russkogo yazyka) (Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Russian (National Russian Corpus Studies)), Moscow: Azbukovnik, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Aleksandrov, Yu.I., Sistemnaya psikhofiziologiya, in Psikhofiziologiya (Psychophysiology), 2nd ed., Aleksandrov, Yu.I, Ed., St. Petersburg: Piter, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Ziegler, J.C., Besson, M., Jacobs, A.M., et al., Word, pseudoword, and nonword processing: a multitask comparison using event-related brain potentials, J. Cogn. Neurosci, 1997, vol. 9, no. 6, p. 758.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  29. Schendan, H.E., Ganis, G., and Kutas, M., Neurophysiological evidence for visual perceptual categorization of words and faces within 150 ms, Psychophysiol., 1998, vol. 35, no. 3, p. 240.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  30. Mar’ina, I.V. and Strelets, V.B., Vliyanie smyslovogo soderzhaniya verbal’nykh stimulov i ikh znachimosti na vyzvannye potentsialy mozga, Zh. Vyssh. Nervn. Deyat., 2010, vol. 60, no. 1, p. 22.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Yum, Y.N., Holcomb, P.J., and Grainger, J., Words and pictures: an electrophysiological investigation of domain specific processing in native Chinese and English speakers, Neuropsychol., 2011, vol. 49, no. 7, p. 1910.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Amenta, S. and Crepaldi, D., Morphological processing as we know it: an analytical review of morphological effects in visual word identification, Front. Psychol., 2012, vol. 3.

  33. Shtyrov, Y., Kujala, T., and Pulvermüller, F., Interactions between language and attention systems: early automatic lexical processing?, J. Cogn. Neurosci., 2010, vol. 22, no. 7, p. 1465.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  34. MacGregor, L.J., Pulvermüller, F., van Casteren, M., and Shtyrov, Y., Ultra-rapid access to words in the brain, Nature Communications, 2012, vol. 3, p. 2041.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Federmeier, K., Kluender, R., and Kutas, M., Aligning linguistic and brain views on language comprehension, in The cognitive electrophysiology of mind and brain, Zani, A., Proverbio, A.M., and Posner, M.I., Eds., New York: Academic Press, 2003, p. 143.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  36. Van Petten, C.K. and Kluender, R., Psycholinguistics electrified II (1994–2005), in Handbook of psycholinguistics, 2nd ed., New York: Academic Press, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Penke, M., Weyerts, H., Gross, M., et al., How the brain processes complex words: an event-related potential study of German verb inflections, Cogn. Brain Res., 1997, vol. 6, no. 1, p. 37.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  38. Gross, M., Say, T., Kleingers, M., et al., Human brain potentials to violations in morphologically complex Italian words, Neurosci. Let., 1998, vol. 241, nos. 2–3, p. 83.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  39. Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Clahsen, H., Lleo, C., et al., Event-related brain responses to morphological violations in Catalan, Cogn. Brain Res., 2001, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 47.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  40. Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Münte, T.F., and Clahsen, H., Morphological priming in Spanish verb forms: an ERP repetition priming study, J. Cogn. Neurosci., 2002, vol. 14, no. 3, p. 443.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  41. Morris, J. and Holcomb, P.J., Event-related potentials to violations of inflectional verb morphology in English, Cogn. Brain Res., 2005, vol. 25, no. 3, p. 963.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Krott, A. and Lebib, R., Electrophysiological evidence for a neural substrate of morphological rule application in correct wordforms, Brain Res., 2013, vol. 1496, p. 70.

    Article  CAS  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  43. Weyerts, H., Penke, M., Dohrn, U., et al., Brain potentials indicate differences between regular and irregular German plurals, NeuroReport, 1997, vol. 8, no. 4, p. 957.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  44. Kutas, M. and Federmeier, K.D., Thirty years and counting: finding meaning in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP), Annu. Rev. Psychol., 2011, vol. 62, p. 621.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  45. Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. and Schlesewsky, M., An alternative perspective on “semantic p600” effects in language comprehension, Brain Res. Rev., 2008, vol. 59, no. 1, p. 55.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  46. Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. and Schlesewsky, M., Processing syntax and morphology: a neurocognitive perspective, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Aleksandrov, I.O. and Maksimova, N.E., Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in psychophysiological studies, in Psikhofiziologiya (Psychophysiology), 2nd ed., Aleksandrov, Yu.I., Ed., St. Petersburg: Piter, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  48. Marchenko, O.P. and Bezdenezhnykh, B.N., Kategorizatsiya slov kak sposob izucheniya mezhsistemnykh otnoshenii, Psikhol. Zh., 2008, vol. 29, no. 3, p. 97.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Marchenko, O.P., Elektricheskie potentsialy mozga, svyazannye s kategorizatsiei nazvanii odushevlennykh i neodushevlennykh ob“ektov, Eksperim. Psikhol., 2010, no. 1, p. 5.

    Google Scholar 

  50. Slioussar, N.A., Kireev, M.V., Chernigovskaya, T.V., and Medvedev, S.V., An ER-fMRI study of Russian verb morphology, Brain Lang., 2014, vol. 130, p. 33.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bechtereva Institute of the Human Brain, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

    S. G. Danko, J. A. Boytsova, M. L. Solovjeva & S. V. Medvedev

  2. St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

    T. V. Chernigovskaya

Authors
  1. S. G. Danko
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. J. A. Boytsova
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. M. L. Solovjeva
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. T. V. Chernigovskaya
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. S. V. Medvedev
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to S. G. Danko.

Additional information

Original Russian Text © S.G. Danko, J.A. Boytsova, M.L. Solovjeva, T.V. Chernigovskaya, S.V. Medvedev, 2014, published in Fiziologiya Cheloveka, 2014, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 5–12.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Danko, S.G., Boytsova, J.A., Solovjeva, M.L. et al. Event-related brain potentials when conjugating Russian verbs: The modularity of language procedures. Hum Physiol 40, 237–243 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0362119714030050

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S0362119714030050

Keywords

Search

Navigation